I came to Toramori to challenge Soshintsu Taiga, but when I got there, my plans changed drastically.
The entire way to the top of the hill, I imagined what I'd do once I got to the clearing that provided the view to his admittedly beautiful mansion. I'll even admit that I may have been muttering one-liners to myself that I'd confidently shout on the flight up as I dodged forest tigers and replayed the washed-up old Metaswordsman slander against me in my head.
When I found out that Taiga had mentioned me in Tekker’s most recent AntaKan video, I wasn't exactly shocked to know that he was talking shit. Having people shittalk you is just part of being a Metafighter. It does come a bit harshly when you're a woman Metafighter just because of how men are, but hey, in the words of the late great Summerwoman Sonia, the only way to convert a misogynist into a feminist is by beating his ass.
I knew what I had to do when I heard his fake laugh. I almost turned the video off right then and there, but just so I'd have material to clap back to, I kept watching.
“When’s the last time that bitch did anything with her katana, other than to [BLEEP]ing block an attack?” Taiga asked rhetorically with a sneer. “That thing on her hip is practically decoration!”
“So is that thing between your legs,” one of my fans had replied in a PicTalk video stitching that moment to her mini-thinkpiece about male Metafighters and their treatment of women. I tapped on the little speech bubble on the side of the screen while listening to her talk to get a glimpse of the army of angry, middle-aged Taiga fans storming her comments section.
While it was fun to watch a bunch of old men seethe and cry on my phone, it was still up to me to go to the source, so to speak. So almost immediately after the video was over, I packed my shit and started heading for Toramori to show that geezer the consequences of disrespecting Takako Hatoya.
Right when I reached the top of the obnoxiously long stairwell leading to Taiga’s front door, whatever my one-liner was gonna be dissolved in my head as soon as I saw a young boy lying in a pool of blood.
“Oh, shit!” That was all I could say when I rushed over and knelt down beside him.
I took my purse from off my shoulder and pulled out my baggie of hermit berries. I stuck one of the little softly glowing purple fruits into his mouth and awkwardly forced his jaw open and shut to make him chew it. Thankfully, his instinct took over and he finished chewing and swallowing the berry himself. After a couple more berries, the bleeding stopped, so I picked him up and started carrying him down the hill.
The kid had a spiky mess of dirty-blonde hair and wore a tattered collared jacket, with what I presumed was a brand new hole in the back matching the location of his wound. Under the jacket was a dark green crop-top, which now proudly displayed a bloody gash to the left of his belly button. The strong scent of blood, sweat, and dirt rose from his body, which I'd normally find repulsive, but this was a kid, who should be stressing about high school exams or procrastinating on his homework to play video games late at night instead of laying out in the cold, bleeding out. I looked back up at the mansion and shook my head. Did Taiga fight him, stab him in the back, and leave him out like this to die? I felt a whole new level of disgust at him than before.
I picked the kid up and flew him down the hill to my car. The frigid forest air whipped him relentlessly in the face, stirring him awake.
“I lost…” the kid quietly muttered, barely audible over the sound of the wind and my Metaki whisper-howling together in my ears.
“It’s okay, kid,” I told him, not entirely sure what to say. “You were going up against an S-tier. One of the greatest Metafighters in the world. Honestly, it’s possible that nobody in the game right now can beat him.” I didn’t mean to say that last part, but the words came out anyway. I bit my tongue. Was that really what I’d thought?
The kid tried to reach for something over his shoulder, then looked at me, wide-eyed and panicked. “...my sword!”
“I didn’t see a sword with you when I picked you up. Taiga probably took it,” I explained.
The boy shoved himself off me and fell face-first into the snow.
“You’re too spent to get up now!” I told him as I descended. I picked him up by the arms and lifted him out of the snow. “I can sense it. You used all the energy you had in that fight with Taiga. You went beyond your limit.” Way beyond. Usually, an Aligned person can sense a tiny bit of energy within another Aligned person, even when they’re not fighting. And when a person’s just eaten a hermit berry, you can sense that tiny bit slowly budding into their optimal battle strength. But sensing this kid’s energy was like seeing a cheap flashlight’s faint and barely usable glow from a kilometer away in a thick forest in the middle of the night, not unlike the one we were in at the moment. That is to say, it was there, but it was way too weak to help any.
I set him down on his feet and he tried to breathe and charge up his energy. His aura fizzled off his body in a faint, barely noticeable gray color.
“I said give it a rest!” I put a hand on his shoulder. Male Metafighters were always like that; so desperate to prove their strength to the other man that they couldn’t tell when it was time to just take the loss.
He then put one hand up, gritted his teeth, and looked up with an expression of anguished pleading.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Instead of answering my question, he lowered his hand and looked down at it with its other in despair. “It won’t come to me…” he said, his voice wavering.
Great, I thought. Now he’s ignoring me. The longer I spend with this guy, the more he’s acting like a typical man.
“I don’t have anywhere to go.” The boy covered his face and I heard a muffled sniff from behind his palms. The helpless child that I’d thought I’d seen when I first arrived at the top of that concrete staircase came back.
I rubbed his shoulders and tried to remember some of the things my friends would tell me when I lost a fight and cried. “It’ll be okay. It’s not the end of the world. I can take you home, and I’ll buy you a new sword.”
I normally wouldn’t be this nice to someone I’d never met, but the way he was crying just reminded me so much of myself during my first fight. Like him, I was in way over my own head. I had challenged Hestia Fiametta, bitchy heir to the prestigious Fiametta family, over some shit she’d said online about my high school and our Metafighting club. I’d just designed an awesome new set of armor with a big, glowing neon pink heart on the chestplate and I was really feeling myself. My classmates were hyping me up about it all, too, and I felt like the protagonist in a made-for-TV teen movie. So when she beat me in minutes, I was in the locker with my face in my hands, out of energy, with smoke fizzling from my chestplate. I imagined the situation had been kinda similar with this kid, so I couldn’t help but offer what my friends back then offered me that day: rest, recovery, and new equipment to train and get stronger with.
“I don’t have a home,” he sobbed, collapsing to his knees.
“I can’t just buy another sword!!!” He yelled, wiping his eyes, bringing the man in him back out. “That was the Kenken-Ken Ken!!!”
“...Are you serious?”
“Dead serious!!”
A forest tiger suddenly jumped out from the trees at the kid, as if his yelling disturbed from its slumber. I then grabbed him from under the arms and flew up above the trees.
“So you mean it’s not a replica or something–”
“No!!! It was the real thing!” He yelled again, apparently ungrateful for having saved his life for the second time. “I took it out of the crater of the Babel Blast!!”
“Holy shit,” I breathed as I tried to look around for my car on the side of the road lining the side of Toramori. I was really about to fight the current world’s strongest Metaswordsman wielding the previous strongest Metaswordsman’s blade. As I glanced at Taiga’s mansion from above, which looked a lot like an expensive dollhouse I wanted when I was little, I thought about how insanely over my head I would have been challenging him on this particular night.
In my head, I briefly thanked the kid for having been there, bleeding out, so I could save him before I got decimated. But then again, if he hadn’t been there, Taiga wouldn’t have had the Kenken-Ken Ken. I decided instead to thank my own motherly instincts for deciding to step in and save him instead of just letting him lie there.
“Hey,” The kid said, looking up at me. “Thanks for saving me and everything, but who the hell are you?!”
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Ah. There’s those thanks I deserve. How polite of you, I thought to myself. There was a twinge in the fact that the boy didn’t know who I was, even though I’ve been in the pro Metafighting game for about ten years, but fuck it, I was used to not being recognized.
“My name’s Takako Hatoya. Who the hell are you?”
“Ken.”
“You got a family name, or…?”
“I don’t remember my family.”
“Oh. Star 17. Sorry to hear that.”
After that, I spotted my car and floated down with my mouth shut, trying to think of something to say other than sorry.
“So, uh, where are you taking me?” Ken asked once I put him down.
That was a good question. “I can take you to a homeless shelter,” I suggested.
“What’s that?”
I hid my shock to answer his question. “It’s a place where homeless people can get help,” I explained as I opened the passenger side door of my car and gestured for him to hop in.
Ken chuckled as he got in. “This is my first time being in a car. Well, there was this one time a guy tried to get me in his van, but I ended up not going with him.”
My eyes widened and I gulped as I grasped the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. I didn’t know what to say to that. “Well…Umm…I hope you enjoy your first car ride…” My inflection rose by accident, like I was asking a question.
The more I talked to Ken, the more grateful and privileged I felt for the life I’d lived up till now.
“So, where are you from, Ken?” I asked as I started the car.
“Kenken-Ken.”
“Really?” I chuckled.
“Well, yeah. What’s so funny.”
“You’re Ken from Kenken-Ken? That’s what your parents named you?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm.” I tapped my thumbs on the steering wheel in contemplation. A lot was going through my head with this new piece of information. A bunch of things I learned in school about Kenken-Ken, plus a few videos and articles I’d read outside of school came to mind.
“I read somewhere that all the Babel Blast survivors were Disaligned. And all those survivors’ kids also grew up to never Align,” I told Ken, wondering what his thoughts were on that rumor.
“Well, I’m obviously Aligned. And I know some other people from there who are Aligned, too. So that’s a bullshit rumor,” Ken replied.
“Is there anybody you know from there who wants to go pro?”
“Well, there are people there who say they do, but they never actually have what it takes, y’know? They have no real drive or ambition.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hardly anybody ever wants to leave the place,” he explained. “It’s like something’s got everybody stuck there. I think there’s something in their souls keeping them there.”
“I’ve heard that the Babel Blast may have also affected people’s souls.”
“That might be true, honestly.”
“Hmm. So how did you get out?”
“Well, the day I realized I needed to get out was the day I found the sword. That gave me purpose.” He then sighed and looked out the window wistfully. “Now…I guess I gotta try and get it back after I get some rest. Otherwise, I’m just…lost.”
“Yeah, but…how did you get out? Like, did somebody drive you, or…”
“Nah. I ran. Then I took a guy’s bike.”
“You ran and biked all the way across Higashima?!”
“Yep. Took almost a week, too.”
“That’s thirty thousand fucking kilometers!!”
“Oh. Um, is that a lot?”
“Yes, it’s a lot! That’s the whole damn country!!”
“Ohhh…” He said it with a certain indifference, like he really wasn’t comprehending how insane of a feat that is.
“No wonder you’re so worn out! You spent almost a whole week pushing your body to the limit!”
“Ohhh…”
We rode together in silence for a bit longer as I wound down the mountain into Toramachi.
“Holy shit!!” Ken shouted, shattering the silence in a random instant. “I just realized this is the first conversation I've ever had with a professional Metafighter!” I found that to be a particularly strange thing to remark, given that for the last few minutes we hadn't been talking at all. “Well, really, it's the second, counting Taiga, but fuck that guy.”
I couldn't help but laugh. I was starting to like this kid. The contrast between his freaky strength and ambition and his childish giddiness was just really charming.
“Tell me how you first got into Metafighting!” he demanded with a grin.
I smiled, too, thinking back to one of my earliest memories: watching “Summerwoman” Sonia Kano on TV at the age of 3.
“Well, I've been a fan of Metafighting for as long as I can remember…” I began to explain.
“Who were you inspired by?” Ken asked excitedly.
“Summerwoman Sonia,” I responded with a nostalgic grin. “She was doing a commercial for the BakaBurger, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever. She did get ultimate move where fire erupts from her chest onto a bunch of raw patties, and I was convinced that that was how every burger was made there! So I'd always beg my parents to take me there in hopes that I'd meet her. And from then on, I wanted to be just like her.”
Ken laughed and covered his face. “That's super lame!” He said, hopefully jokingly.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I laughed back. “At least my inspiration didn't stab me in the back and steal my sword!”
“Bitch, please! My inspiration isn't Taiga. It's Asa Astra! And as far as I'm concerned, he was the greatest one to ever do it! And now I'm gonna be just like him!” I decided to excuse his calling me a bitch and didn’t let it bother me.
“Well, aaaaaanyway, as I was saying, I was always a fan of Metafighting, but I got the chance to become one when I went to high school. They had a Metafighting club, so I joined. That's where I learned most of the stuff I know now. That's where I learned swordplay, designed my first armor–” I tapped proudly onto the big pink light-up heart on my chestplate, which of course was an updated design from back in high school. “–and, yeah, loooong story short, I went on to college, got my bachelor's in Meta-engineering, and hit the scene. I can't believe it's been more than ten years since freshman year.” I sighed the sigh of a decade’s worth of training, welding, smashing hammers on hot metal, making friends and enemies, harassment from men (and sometimes women), humiliating defeats, and a handful of wins in the arena that never feels like enough.
Ken sighed too. “I wish I would've gone to school. What was that like?”
“Well, it’s a lot of fun. I’ve got lots of memories from that time, both good and bad. The schoolwork sucks, but outside of that…There’s a level of freedom that you kinda lose when you get older. They try to impose this feeling that you’ve got to make something of yourself when you’re an adult–and, y’know, that’s definitely still present in high school, but it–you can kind of ignore it a lot more. When you graduate, that pressure increases a lot. ‘Till you’re just a rat in a race. Or like a salmon swimming against the current. It’s a lot harder to make friends once you’re out of school. The days seem shorter, too.”
“Well, damn,” Ken cursed solemnly. “So what’ve I got to look forward to now that I’m an adult and I’m starting to get out into this world?”
“Hmm. I guess…What you need is passion. Something that’ll make all the hard work and pressure and swimming upstream worth it. That’s why I’m a Metafighter.”
“So basically, I’ve just gotta keep doing what I’m doing.” Ken smiled in relief. “That’s why I need to get that sword back!”
Once we got down the mountain, I stopped for gas and to look up the homeless shelter on GPS. The whole time, Ken proved to be quite the conversationalist. He told me a lot about his childhood, how he lived near the crater of the Babel Blast, about the drunk guy who lived under the bridge next to it, and about people who took him in and let them live with him, but it was obvious he was holding back a lot of memories he’d rather not divulge. I could tell by the way he jumped across large time periods as he told his life story and how he’d look out the window instead of at me at certain points.
The homeless shelter was actually a quite gorgeous old place on the outskirts of town. The huge facility had the traditional sloping roofs tiled with kawara that you don’t really see anymore. On each corner of the roofs perched miniature statues of forest tigers, protectively watching over the downtrodden people who would make their way here. I silently questioned how exactly a homeless person was supposed to make their way out here, because of how far out from the metropolitan area this place was, which is where homeless people tend to be. It took at least a 30-minute drive from the bustling downtown area with the tiny, steel skyscraping apartment buildings to this tranquil and expansive collection of wood and rice-paper homes built in the middle of nature.
The process of getting Ken checked in was a pretty simple one. There was a woman in a kimono in the front building sipping tea and trying her damnedest to stay awake for us. She spoke wearily, but happily, and made Ken sign some paperwork, which Ken took what I thought was a kind of unnecessarily long time looking at the fine print.
“So, um, are the two of you related?” Asked the woman checking us in. I didn’t really know what her job title was supposed to be. Secretary? Bellhop? Caretaker?
I looked at her, pointed at Ken, then myself awkwardly. “Oh, us? Oh, no, no.” I forced a laugh from my diaphragm. “I actually found him outside Soshintsu Taiga’s house. Y’know, the Metafighter? The bastard left him there for dead!” I turned back to Ken. “Y’know, I think you should press charges. You didn’t sign a deathmatch consent form, did you?”
“I can’t press charges! That’d be like saying I wanted him to hold back on me!”
“So you ran up to his house ready to die?!” I asked.
“Not exactly, but dying in battle is just one of those things you have to risk when you’re a Metafighter.”
“Oh, my God. You really think you’re Asa Astra, don’t you?”
Ken laughed as he finished signing whatever he was signing and handed the paper back to the woman in the kimono. “No. I think I’m me.”
Suddenly, I felt kind of scared of him. I don’t really know why. After the paperwork was finished, I realized in relief that I was finally done helping him, and I left the building, not trying to make it look like I was in too much of a rush, then sped home, exhausted. There was this ominous feeling in my gut the entire seven-hour drive back to my house. It wasn’t even until I was laying in my bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling from under my comforter that I realized that I didn’t even challenge Taiga. Then again, maybe it was for the best. I hated myself for thinking that. I hated Taiga even more for leaving me that distraction in the form of a dying kid bleeding out in front of his mansion.